David McElroy

There are some things about myself that I’d rather not realize. This is one of them.

Facebook recently started sending me regular “report cards” about my posting performance.

“You’ve recently been posting less often,” it said. “Create new content to catch up.”

Catch up to what?

I don’t work for Facebook. Nobody is paying me to keep its users entertained. I have no obligation to feed its endless appetite for photos, videos, jokes, observations or essays. Yet the notification implied that posting regularly was somehow my responsibility — and it gently encouraged me to get back to work.

The message irritated me.

At first, I thought I knew why. Like most people, I don’t enjoy software telling me how to behave. The platform wants more content because more content keeps people scrolling, which benefits Meta. That much is obvious.

But after thinking about it for a while, I realized that wasn’t the real reason the notification bothered me.

The real reason was that it touched a nerve I didn’t want to acknowledge. I’ve become an unpaid sharecropper on the social media plantation — and I’ve let myself be brainwashed to crave the attention that the platforms promise me.

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This story is about me. Only me. It’s about my ego and insecurities and fears and needs.

I typically write what I think might be useful for others to know and understand, but this is different. It’s more like a diary entry. A confessional. A cry of frustration.

It’s the sort of thing I would address to a wife or partner or trusted companion — if I had a woman in that role. It’s my half of a conversation which I would need to have with someone who loved me and believed in me and was permanently a part of my life.

So this probably isn’t for you.

I’m struggling right now. In many ways, things are the best in my life that they’ve been for at least 20 years. I have stability and purpose again. I know where I want to go. I’m more clear about my values and my priorities than I’ve ever been in my life.

But I’m struggling with the gap between how things ought to be and the reality I see in front of me. And that gap terrifies me — because nobody lives forever.

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It’s become trendy among angry young left-wing Americans to claim that Jesus is a socialist.

These naive and affluent people think they love socialism. They know that Jesus preached about feeding the poor and needy — and they think that a socialist system would take money away from rich people — so they draw the conclusion that Jesus and socialism are compatible.

It’s an incredibly ignorant conclusion, but most of them genuinely believe this nonsense. And their good intentions pave a path straight to economic and social hell for the people they claim to care about.

Jesus told his followers to love their enemies, feed the poor and store up treasures in heaven rather than in this life. Some of his followers obeyed. Some who claimed to be his followers did not.

In both cases, it was a voluntary decision.

But can you find any instance in which Jesus told his followers to take money and material goods away from other people — without their consent — in order to feed the poor?

Go ahead and read the gospels. All four of them. I’ll wait. You won’t find anything close to that. And taking money away from other people without their consent — what we generally call theft — is one of the central tenets of socialism.

Without theft, socialism cannot exist.

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